Ephemera's Report

[This account of last week's game is penned by my wife, also known as the magic-user Ephemera. Notes from me, as GM, are in brackets.]

As every student of the arcane knows, there is a time for all things.. a time to press the attack, and a time to regroup.  The adventuring band retired to Trossley, rested a night but soon stepped up to fight once again - the horrifying not-plant, not-animal creature glimpsed beneath the millhouse was still at large. 

Fortified by a few supplies and stalwart city guards, mostly healed, but once again recklessly advancing with their divine spells expended, the party returned to the mill.  (Minus the faithless oathbreaker Lessig the Elf, who left in the night taking Ephemera's generous pay advance with him. [1])  They brought the  "lump monster" to bay and dispatched it along with a few other similarly slimy denizens; the group left full exploration of the tunnels for another day.

The party and allies took heart from this success, but all was not yet set to rights. The foul millstones remained.  After Ric son of Nic had been executed by the townspeople in the earlier incident, Trossley went to considerable effort to remove and bury the stones.. but a short while later, they had vanished from the burial site leaving only an empty hole. 

Next order of business:  resupply and continued investigation.  The party set out for the nearby city of Utherton, a very different community from Trossley - as evinced by its 3cp entry toll and thriving commerce.  The party visited Utherton's famous Street of Ranged Weapons, adding Cordoon's brother Callow to their ranks as a henchman.

Utherton's religious authorities also differed sharply from the down-home priest of Trossley.  Despite the urgency of the stones' sorcerous threat, little succor came from an interview with the sub-sub-hierarch of the Church. After some remonstration, he spoke of inquisitors of St. Damien [2] to arrive in Trossley in a matter of weeks.  The party also consulted Ephemera's arcane mentor Joia, who gave some hope of a means to investigate the party's possibly evil, possibly magical loot.  She also shared knowledge of the Dark Mother, a dark, sorcerous, chthonic being invoked by the spectacled sorcerer in his last fight and revered by earthly evildoers.

Finally, returning to Trossley the adventurers fell in with a strange traveling vendor of exotic magical wares - Motley Tom by name, looking to purvey his expensive goods in the village, little realizing how far the adventuring spirit had fallen off in recent years.  And back at the inn Lessig had returned his pay with a note of apology.. apparently his oath of loyalty sworn before St. Hermas was more than empty words in the Saint's eyes...


[1] I judged her generous offer of two weeks' pay in advance would incur a loyalty check; hirelings must be kept content but hungry .... Even with the bonuses from the Oath of St. Hermas, not much you can do against boxcars. The loyalty, reaction and morale rules are definitely earning their keep in this game.

[2] St. Damien is the patron of a secretive and itinerant group of Church exorcists, dispatched to purify people, places and things from unholy influence. Trained in White and Gray magics, they gain access to all spells of dispelling at one spell level lower. They wear black soutanes and skullcaps, and are well equipped with blessed waters, crosses, weapons and parchments. Due to their infrequent appearance and grim legendry, they are held in awe and trembling by most common folk.

Mapping Woes: Any Ideas?

My output of rules and game theory ideas has been slowing down as real life increases its demands, and Actual Play (TM) also puts requirements on my time. The hope is that the experience proves a testing ground for the theory, anyway.

One pragmatic problem that's come up is what to use for dungeon and campaign mapping - with the aim of producing not just something useable, but something that can be shared and shown out with a fair amount of pride. My original maps for the Cellars of the Castle Ruins, which I was running over the summer, were done using the freeware program AutoRealm. However, while richly supplied with graphic elements like stairs, rubble, jagged lines, and doors, AutoRealm consistently showed problems with maintaining line thickness at various resolutions. Perhaps combined with this, snapping to the graph paper grid was often a little bit off, and the map's shapes would shift around no matter how much I fiddled with it. The upshot of all this was that AR wouldn't produce a production-ready graphic that I was happy with, though the rough and ready map was fine for running sessions from.

For the Trossley campaign I experimented with mapping a few key sites in PowerPoint. Although it's a fairly good object-oriented program that allows a grid and approximation to graph paper, it's harder to get one's hands on the requisite shapes for mapping. I may have to hack together some stair, door and window icons for cutting and pasting. All the same, I'm confident that Powerpoint will serve my needs in the short term, even though the maps do look a little pedestrian.

What's the consensus out there - do I really need to put down cash for Campaign Cartographer or the like to get decent looking dungeon maps? Note that tile-based programs are right out for my rather geometrically convoluted architectures, though my modest need for outdoor mapping so far is handled decently by Hexographer.

HeroQuest: Tactics and Tactiles

I played this for the first time the other night as part of our local pub boardgames night, taking the part of a dwarf in a full party through the first two scenarios. Pretty neat, very simple dungeon crawling missions from 1989 Milton Bradley with help from Games Workshop - the involvement of the hardcore hobby gaming pros definitely shows.

I think when it was released I ignored it pretty much as a "kids' game," and it certainly is that, but it teaches fun lessons. Initiative is achieved by running right at things and whacking them. The dungeon furniture is cool, though disappointingly generic in game effects. The miniatures are really well sculpted and could form a starter set for a beginning DM in a more serious game. Although the game is cooperative in theory (4 players against a game master), the lure of treasure is strong and there's room for some sharp elbows, blocking off doors to rich chambers, and the like. And eventually, in a streamlined way, the rules cover such complexities of dungeoneering as secret doors, traps, hidden treasure, wandering monsters, spells and saving throws. There's something to be said for a character sheet that only has 2 numbers on it ...

All the same, the replay value doesn't seem long on a game like this; a few more characters could have helped things out some, or some way for characters to advance beyond just accumulating more gear and loot. There were a whole bunch of expansions, too, and I suppose the basic game did its part of getting a generation of kids interested in pushing miniatures around a dungeon.

As Grognardia is talking about entry-level games, I think one plus of HeroQuest is its very tactile nature, coupled with simplicity (a lesson Fantasy Flight need to learn) and completeness of play out of the box. The need for miniatures and tactical displays certainly show that the core D&D brand has staked itself on the tactile experience as a point of sale against the computer game juggernaut.

Will that ultimately mean longer legs than the truly interactive, social and creative experience that's offered as a counterpoint to computer games by the old-school revival? Perhaps, but I know which one is more important in my games.

Crits and Fumbles

This is the the table - short, impressionistic and easy to remember - that I use for critical hits and fumbles.

I'm definitely of the "low impact" school of special combat effects. Not so much getting your eye poked out (that's a result for below 0 hit points - another table to work up) or maiming your buddy with a wild swing, but just minor effects that add flavor to the flow of a combat.

When someone rolls a natural 20 to hit in my game, I use the table to help decide what happens. The victim of the hit chooses whether to take maximum damage from the hit, or to roll the damage normally and suffer a random mishap from the table. If the mishap doesn't apply - for example, nothing is carried in a particular hand, or a creature doesn't have a head - then maximum damage has to happen.

As fumbles, the mishaps can also occur on a natural to hit roll 1, for the character who rolled it, but in that case there is no consequence if a particular mishap doesn't apply.

Click to see all

I will sometimes allow a save to avoid the effects, if conditions are particularly good to avoid them. For example, if wearing a helmet, you can make a Body save (with a constitution-based bonus) to avoid being stunned for 1 round; if not, the save avoids being stunned for 2 rounds instead of 1. If solidly positioned on good dry footing, you can make a Speed save (with dexterity-based bonus) to avoid falling. If your held item is a greatsword and the opponent's is a dagger, that's also Body to avoid dropping it. "Repositioning" covers things like charging past an opponent, or them slipping around your back.

Right now, breakage tests are ruled according to common sense, but I'm working on a system to handle quick and easy non-living object damage. That and the "death and dismemberment" table I want to use are both coming up.

Mythos Kids

Kids draw the cutest shoggoths - when egged on by David Milano.

(Note: There are some who take the Cthulhu Mythos highly seriously and recoil at the numerous attempts to make it comically cute and familiar. I'm not one of those. I'd rather people get upset about how Gojira did a face turn from terrifying apocalyptic Hiroshima allegory to campy rubber-suit monster fighting giant frankensteins.)

The Millhouse Burns

Tonight was the climax of the Millhouse Saga. Rushing to the porch of the white house, the adventurers found flames all around, the guardsman they'd posted there beating out his burning clothing (miraculously, he survived), and the Orange Goblin and a hooded figure high-tailing it out of the compound - the Goblin weighed down by a medium-sized chest he was toting on his crooked back.

The party at first decided to let them go, but after extinguishing the flames and fending off the ivy tendrils that still danced to the arrhythmic grinding of the millstones, decided to give chase. Doing a foot chase betwen two parties of equal speed is a tough job. I ended up rolling DEX checks for the fastest runner, the NPC woodsman Burnsteen, being helmed by the player of the militant who got KO'd and ear-gouged by the Orange Goblin, and giving him an extra d6 roll against his wilderness skill - each passed check meant a 10 foot gain. Meanwhile the other two were rolling DEX as well. After some six rounds of this I also started rolling STR checks for stamina. It was fun, especially when the hooded figure turned around to cast Gust of Wind and Force Shield spells to try to confound pursuit, but it was all ultimately preordained as the law of large numbers caught up to the villains.

(If anyone has a better or more conclusive chase procedure than the one I winged up please let me know!)

The sorcerer threw back his hood and sneered defiantly - it was the spectacled figure who'd instigated the whole bone meal plot. The Goblin, who'd dropped the chest a long time ago, turned to fight as well. After a short combat with better party rolling than the previous two debacles, it was all over for the bad guys. A search of the sorcerer revealed some jewelry, a dagger of virtuous steel, and a fearsome black book. The dropped chest was looted of coins, and it was back to the millhouse to try and stop the grinding stones.

The door to the millstone room was open, and a horrific sight within - the rotating stones engraved with silver-chased runes of ominous portent, and smeared with a foul-smelling slurry of blood, bone fragments and chunks. Fortunately, Grumpka the dwarf did extremely well figuring out the mechanism, and a well-placed spear shut down the grinding. A hole in the wooden floor revealed a cellar with something amorphous, neither plant nor animal, covered with tentacles, mouths and eyes; it scuttled away from the torchlight and nobody seemed up for descending. In the next room over was a pillar-like statue of a dense and unfamiliar black wood carved with sinister braids and half-tortured, half-laughing faces, next to a strangely hypnotic rug. Searching the other buildings revealed various mundane treasures, and a rotten top floor that sent Grumpka plunging to land among (luckily, not on) the wounded in the room below.

It was then decided to stop messing around, and gather kindling for a torching of the accursed millhouse, pyre also for the bodies of sorcerer and goblins. In trying to appropriate a barrel for fire control, Grumpka (like everyone else, down to a last few HP) and the captain of the guard came face to, um, eye with a barrel beast courtesy of my Varlets & Vermin selection. Fortunately, the thing was quickly enough put down and the house burned down to blackened timbers in hours. With a mighty crash the demonic millstones fell into the cellar - but ominously, the pillar still stood, unharmed by the fire.

This was the first really successful session, with nobody KO'd, foes defeated, and a decent if not spectacular haul of treasure. Party members are at about 500 xp - we'll have to see if I stick to 2000 as a level-up figure or show some mercy. They could really use the insurance of another hit die ... but good things don't come easy!

Also, props to my wife for surprising me with a custom Roles, Rules & Rolls DM screen for my upcoming birthday! Photos soon.

Mittellus: Religion

Some notes on the religious history of the world, Mittellus, that houses the Trossley campaign.

The Old Way has always been the way of man: gods that were their domains, harvest and springing stag, rills and mountain peaks, served by shamans, Druach votaries, goat-leapers and wind-witches. Cut down time and again by the empires of men, the ancient rites find accommodation, and spring back when empires fall. But this time, they have competition: the Church.

In the dark years after the breaking of the Millennial Empire, it was commanded that three prophets receive the Revelation that there is but one God: Odaus, the sage of the East; Invictus, the young soldier of the West; and Amalthea, aristocrat of the ravaged Millennial homelands. Spreading the word and the blessings of holy miracles, the three found each other within a decade, and the Church was formed. Then, on a mission to convert a King of the North, Odaus betrayed the Lady Amalthea to the barbarians to save his own skin, a despicable act for which his followers in the East blamed Invictus. So was born the schism of the churches, West against East, with Amalthea as martyr.

Folk-saints Phoebe and Mitras counsel King Thonar

It has been five hundred years since then. Kings and pontifices of the West have waged near-constant war, against priest-emperors of the East and eruptions of barbarians and worse from the edges of the world. Trossley sits in a landlocked area of the Northern Continent Alatoria, within the sphere of the Western Church, but here the reach of the Sacred Seat is tenuous. Mitras, Hermas, Froellia, Uncumber, Eracle and other folk-saints are much honored hereabouts. Priests are trained and knowledge concentrated in fortified phalansteries, and it seems every town of some standing is trying to build a church to rival its neighbors.

Enemies of the Church are many. The benighted Eastern followers of Odaus, even more infuriating for their claim to the true Revelation; the Anti-God or Devil known from the Revelation, a subtle fellow with many secret worshippers and guises; the Powers of Beyond, demons of utmost Chaos who enter the world through the gates of human desire; and those who cling to the Old Way, although these are the least of the Church's worries and are even somewhat tolerated in the Alatorian hinterland.

Silvanian mendicant friars

Against these stand the Church hierarchy and the holy Orders. The unforgiving black-robed followers of St. Hieracon are charged with maintaining doctrinal purity and order among the Church and her faithful. The brown-robed hermits and peaceful wanderers of St. Silvain are popular with the common folk but suspected to be soft on the Old Way. The main Militant orders are three: the Order of Valentia, the Order of the Tower, and the wandering Peregrines. Holy Sequina, the Divine Wisdom, shelters mystics and intellectuals alike in her white-robed Order.

Raise, then, the equal-armed Cross and let the banners of the Church advance! But make sure that the Cross you raise has the horizontal bar over the vertical - the Western church's Hilt of Invictus - and not the vertical over the horizontal - sign of the Devil's own heresy, the Staff of Odaus, sacred to the Anti-Church of the East.